Musk’s plan X: keep users in the dark, feed them dung and watch sales mushroom | John Naughton

The social network owner’s business model appears to include a slurry of unmoderated toxicity, such as footage of a murder

At 4am a couple of weeks ago, Ryan Carson, a young activist for social justice, was sitting with his girlfriend at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard in New York. They were on their way home from a wedding party. Carson was suddenly accosted by an aggressive stranger who asked: “What the fuck are you looking at?” and then stabbed him to death.

The murder was captured by a surveillance camera, the video from which somehow made its way to the New York Post and thence on to the internet, where it was seized upon on X, formerly known as Twitter, by one of the social network’s prolific “shitposters” (the ones X’s owner, Elon Musk, calls “creators”). This particular individual specialises in incendiary incidents from all over the world and posts several times a day to just under a million followers.

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